David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. It’s about finding the content fit with your interest, not the person fit, like a person that you know, and not your own perceived content fit. It’s not like I would tell you that I like SciFi. What’s actually become quite clear to me from TikTok is what TikTok has learned. I like prank videos and I like extreme sports things. I’ve been using TikTok for a year and didn’t follow anyone and I followed people this week and didn’t improve my experience at all. It’s still the same stuff from people who I’ve never met that is just very well-tailored to me at this point. Totally. Once they make this changes in the Spring of 2015, the apps just takes off like a rocket ship. Two months later, on July 6, it’s number one in the US iOS App Store. Since then, Musical.ly and then its successor, TikTok, has never fallen out of the top 40 apps, which is pretty incredible. This is the beginning of the rise that puts it not just onSnapchat trajectory, but now well beyond to Instagram and even potentially bigger. There’s a really great talk that he did, Greylock and our friends at GGV, main venture investors in Musical.ly. There’s a great talk that Alex does with Josh Elman at a Greylock product event that’s on YouTube. We’ll link to it in the show notes; you should definitely go watch it. He talks about the philosophy behind this product decision and how it leads to Musical.ly really having a chance to become a social platform instead of just a utility. Remember we talked about Vine. Dubsmash was out there at this point in time. There are a bunch of other competing apps, but what is it about Musical.ly that makes it special, it’s the Ruth B story from Vine. It’s allowing somebody who’s a nobody, who’s brand new to the platform, doesn’t have any special advantages like a celebrity or an influencer, they’re just somebody who has talent. If they put that quality content on a platform because of this recommendation algorithm, platform’s able to find it, surface it to a bunch of people, and make those creators who actually have talent really successful. That’s what this becomes over time, and what TikTok has become is this really interesting two-sided network effect of a creator side and a consumer side, of which there’s a lot of overlap, but they’re actually pretty different. It’s a lot more like YouTube than it is like Instagram or Snapchat or Facebook. On the creator side, even more than YouTube, really what it is, is it’s like a digitization of American Idol or America’s Got Talent, which is you’ve got these people who have aspirations to show their talents, whatever it is, whether it’s extreme sports videos, or comedy, or singing, or music. They believe that the platform, even if they don’t have a following today, if they make something great and they put it on the platform, there’s a chance that they’ll get discovered. Yeah. The interesting thing about this is—two points I want to make—one, in apps where the expectation was set originally that I’m going to express interest in who I care about and then I get to follow them. I get really annoyed later when that promise is broken. Twitter starts doing the algorithmic timeline, Facebook starts to limit organic distribution and makes you pay for exposure if you’re a brand. There’s always things where you start to feel like they’re really messing with what the brand promise was here. TikTok from the very beginning is, “We are going to show you what we think is the most engaging for you, and we make no promises.” Yeah, sure there’s that following tab, but that’s not where you live. You live on the tab where it’s, “Hey this is what we think you most like.”…

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